Open Source Startup Podcast

Yingjun Wu is Founder of RisingWave, a new open source stream processing database. RisingWave has raised $40M from investors including Yunqi Partners. In this episode, we discuss RisingWave's approach versus Apache Flink and other stream processing frameworks, why stream processing is important for real-time monitoring use cases, why they initially focused on startups and how free support helped develop trust with these early users, key decisions around their product and why Postgres compatibility was crucial & more!

Andrew Hoh, Co-Founder of LastMile AI, discusses simplifying AI for developers, LastMile's open periphery approach to open source, Azure as the top cloud provider for AI support, and more. They explore challenges in ML engineering, the significance of open source projects in AI innovation, and the importance of AI Config for model configurations and experimentation.

Loris Degioanni is Founder & CTO of Sysdig, the observability and container security company behind the Falco and Sysdig open source projects. Both projects are widely adopted, with 7K GitHub Stars each. Sysdig is a $2.5B company that has raised over $700M from investors including Insight, Accel, Bain, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Third Point & Permira. In this episode, we dig into Sysdig's roots in infrastructure and the pivotal decision to focus on security 2 years into the company journey, Sysdig's culture of experimentation (and some paranoia) that has helped make them successful, why they thought about their paid product early & much more!

Russ d'Sa is Founder of LiveKit, the real-time streaming audio, video, and data infrastructure platform for developers. Their open source project, also called livekit, provides the end-to-end stack for WebRTC and has over 6K stars on GitHub. In this episode, we dig into LiveKit's unique founding story with the idea coming from the founders' experience building a Clubhouse competitor and using Agora, early interest from companies like Pinterest that gave indications that there was a need for an open source alternative to Agora and Twilio, why Conversational AI will be a big driver for LiveKit & more!

Jeu George, Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, talks about the Conductor project journey, challenges of deploying microservices, utilizing customer feedback for product roadmap, developer playground and content strategy, exploring use cases and competitors, and importance of targeting developers in an open-source project.

We learn about the evolution of browser-based coding, how Coder improved developer experience, their early focus on enterprise customers, the origins and traction of Code Server, their fundraising efforts, and growing the community and achieving early momentum.

Charlie Marsh, Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling, talks about their journey in developing a Python linter and code formatter written in Rust. They discuss the impact of building with Rust, developing deep relationships with their community, and their plans for expanding their Python tooling. They also share insights and advice for open source founders.

Jeff Cross is Co-Founder & CEO of Nx, the build system for maintaining and scaling monorepos, both locally and on CI. Their project, also called nx, has over 20K stars on GitHub. Nx has raised $25M from investors including a16z & Nexus. In this episode, we discuss the benefits of using monorepos and the types of teams and codebases it works well for, crucible moments for the company (ie. when they went beyond the Angular framework), learning how to support large enterprise customers by starting a consulting business first, what great DevEx means to them (speed, automatic migrations, scale) & more!

Kyle Mathews is Co-Founder & CTO of Gatsby, the front-end web development platform. Their open source framework, GatsbyJS, is widely adopted with 55K GitHub Stars. In Feb 2023, Gatsby was acquired by Netlify. In this episode, we discuss how GatsbyJS was able to grow incredibly fast, what features matter most for front-end development frameworks (speed, approachability, etc.), learnings from going after a smaller portion of the market and over-hiring & more!

Pranay Prateek discusses founding Signoz, an open source observability platform, with a focus on tracing, logs, and metrics. They raised $7M from investors. The evolution of observability solutions, the importance of open source, and the growth of OpenTelemetry are key topics. They also touch on the release of logs, simple pricing strategies, and the challenges of managing open-source projects.